Tag Archives: Democracy

On 15 November 2015 US President Barack Obama in a deeply resonant address to an audience of mainly young Greeks in Athens, reminding us of the challenges of democracy in this troubled century, calling for a “course correction” on globalization that has left populations afraid for an uncertain future.

Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter.
— Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

Democracy in the 21st century.

To what extent can a “temporarily elected government” dispose at their will of large swaths of the natural, historical, environmental, cultural, social, economic, etc. , patrimony — “The Commons”, as it is well known — in order to put some pennies (or billions) into the government coffers, or those of their contractual partners, to do with what they want during their short time in office.

Before we get to the content of what the eminent Saudi Historian has to say on this relevant topic of women who want to be raped, let me take you quickly to our Gatnet 2.0 site and show you how you can put to work one of the special tools we have developed to support the collaborative work at Gatnet. Happily, these rather simple tools are also more generally to anyone anywhere who happens to share our interest in the complex topic of women, transport and equity in our oh so different societies.

Now, to show you a sample of how this works, this morning I wanted to know more about the site of the local elections in Saudi Arabia where for the first time 130,000 women registered to vote and when the ballots were counted more than a dozen of these heroes have been elected to local office — for the first time.

So I scrolled down on the right menu here where it indicates KNOOLGE, and popped in the single key word “Saudi” which called up a very large number of entries, with coverage of the latest developments in the voting situation right up top. With the eminent Saudi historian’s remarks toward the end of the first page of entries.

And now if you wish, let’s take a look at that article and see if we can understand what the good gentleman has in mind:

These first excerpts from an article by Adam Davidson published in The New York Times Magazine on 28 July 2015 deserves the closest attention of anyone who wishes to have a balanced understanding of the events shaping what we call here the “Greek crisis”.

There is definitive proof, for anyone willing to look, that Greece is not solely or even primarily responsible for its own financial crisis. The proof is not especially exciting: It is a single bond, with the identification code GR0133004177. But a consideration of this bond should end, permanently, any discussion of Greece’s crisis as a moral failing on the part of the Greeks.

GR0133004177 is the technical name for a bond the Greek government sold on Nov. 10, 2009, in a public auction. Every business day, governments and companies hold auctions like this; it is how they borrow money. Bond auctions, though, are not at all…

The following listing provides links to selected references from international sources of high quality and with quite different points of view. Access to these sources are, as might be expected, quite uneven. About half of them require that you pay or subscribe to access full text of particles. But over these last weeks we have done fairly well with these addresses, offering as they do some quite different perspectives on these unfolding events.

This article contains the timeline of events for the Greek government-debt crisis which began in 2009 and is ongoing. During this period many changes have occurred in Greece. The income of many Greeks has declined, levels of unemployment have increased, elections and resignations of politicians have altered the country’s political landscape radically, the Greek parliament has passed many austerity bills, and protests have become common sights throughout the country. A brief summary follows highlighting some key events since the Greek elections of October 2009.